Time And its Discontents
John Zerzan
The dimension of time seems to be attracting great notice, to judge from the number of recent movies that focus on it, such as Back to the Future, Terminator, Peggy Sue Got Married, etc. Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time (1989) was a best-seller and became, even more surprisingly, a popular film. Remarkable, in addition to the number of books that deal with time, are the larger number which don't, really, but which feature the word in their titles nonetheless, such as Virginia Spate's The Color of Time: Claude Monet (1992). Such references have to do, albeit indirectly, with the sudden, panicky awareness of time, the frightening sense of our being tied to it. Time is increasingly a key manifestation of the estrangement and humiliation that characterize modern existence. It illuminates the entire, deformed landscape and will do so ever more harshly until this landscape and all the forces that shape it are changed beyond recognizing.
This contribution to the subject has little to do with time's fascination for film-makers or TV producers, or with the current academic interest in geologic conceptions of time, the history of clock technology and the sociology of time, or with personal observations and counsels on its use. Neither aspects nor excesses of time deserve as much attention as time's inner meaning and logic. For despite the fact that time's perplexing character has become, in John Michon's estimation, ``almost an intellectual obsession'' (1988), society is plainly incapable of dealing with it.
With time we confront a philosophical enigma, a psychological mystery, and a puzzle of logic. Not surprisingly, considering the massive reification involved, some have doubted its existence since humanity began distinguishing ``time itself'' from visible and tangible changes in the world. As Michael Ende (1984) put it: "There is in the world a great and yet ordinary secret. All of us are part of it, everyone is aware of it, but very few ever think of it. Most of us just accept it and never wonder over it. This secret is time.''
Just what is "time''? Spengler declared that no one should be allowed to ask. The physicist Richard Feynman (1988) answered, ``Don't even ask me. It's just too hard to think about.'' Empirically as much as in theory, the laboratory is powerless to reveal the flow of time, since no instrument exists that can register its passage. But why do we have such a strong sense that time does pass, ineluctably and in one particular direction, if it really doesn't? Why does this "illusion'' have such a hold over us? We might just as well ask why alienation has such a hold over us. The passage of time is intimately familiar, the concept of time mockingly elusive; why should this appear bizarre, in a world whose survival depends on the mystification of its most basic categories?
We have gone along with the substantiation of time so that it seems a fact of nature, a power existing in its own right. The growth of a sense of time--the acceptance of time--is a process of adaptation to an ever more reified world. It is a constructed dimension, the most elemental aspect of culture. Time's inexorable nature provides the ultimate model of domination.
The further we go in time the worse it gets. We inhabit an age of the disintegration of experience, according to Adorno. The pressure of time, like that of its essential progenitor, division of labor, fragments and disperses all before it. Uniformity, equivalence, separation are byproducts of time's harsh force. The intrinsic beauty and meaning of that fragment of the world that is not-yet- culture moves steadily toward annihilation under a single cultures-wide clock. Paul Ricoeur's assertion (1985) that "we are not capable of producing a concept of time that is at once cosmological, biological, historical and individual,'' fails to notice how they are converging.
Concerning this "fiction'' that upholds and accompanies all the forms of imprisonment, "the world is filled with propaganda alleging its existence,'' as Bernard Aaronson (1972) put it so well. ``All awareness,'' wrote the poet Denise Levertov (1974), "is an awareness of time,'' showing just how deeply alienated we are in time. We have become regimented under its empire, as time and alienation continue to deepen their intrusion, their debasement of everyday life. ``Does this mean,'' as David Carr (1988) asks, ``that the `struggle' of existence is to overcome time itself?'' It may be that exactly this is the last enemy to be overcome.
In coming to grips with this ubiquitous yet phantom adversary, it is somewhat easier to say what time is not. It is not synonymous, for fairly obvious reasons, with change. Nor is it sequence, or order of succession. Pavlov's dog, for instance, must have learned that the sound of the bell was followed by feeding; how else could it have been conditioned to salivate at that sound? But dogs do not possess time consciousness, so before and after cannot be said to constitute time.
Somewhat related are inadequate attempts to account for our all but inescapable sense of time. The neurologist Gooddy (1988), rather along the lines of Kant, describes it as one of our ``subconscious assumptions about the world.'' Some have described it, no more helpfully, as a product of the imagination, and the philosopher J.J.C. Smart (1980) decided that it is a feeling that ``arises out of metaphysical confusion.'' McTaggart (1908), F.H. Bradley (1930), and Dummett (1978) have been among 20th century thinkers who have decided against the existence of time because of its logically contradictory features, but it seems fairly plain that the presence of time has far deeper causes than mere mental confusion.
There is nothing even remotely similar to time. It is as unnatural and yet as universal as alienation. Chacalos (1988) points out that the present is a notion just as puzzling and intractable as time itself. What is the present? We know that it is always now; one is confined to it, in an important sense, and can experience no other ``part'' of time. We speak confidently of other parts, however, which we call ``past'' and ``future.'' But whereas things that exist in space elsewhere than here continue to exist, things that don't exist now, as Sklar (1992) observes, don't really exist at all.
Time necessarily flows; without its passage there would be no sense of time. Whatever flows, though, flows with respect to time. Time therefore flows with respect to itself, which is meaningless owing to the fact that nothing can flow with respect to itself. No vocabulary is available for the abstract explication of time apart from a vocabulary in which time is already presupposed. What is necessary is to put all the givens into question. Metaphysics, with a narrowness that division of labor has imposed from its inception, is too narrow for such a task.
What causes time to flow, what is it that moves it toward the future? Whatever it is, it must be beyond our time, deeper and more powerful. It must depend as Conly (1975) had it, ``upon elemental forces which are continually in operation.''
William Spanos (1987) has noted that certain Latin words for culture not only signify agriculture or domestication, but are translations from Greek terms for the spatial image of time. We are, at base, ``time-binders'', in Alfred Korzybski's lexicon (1948); the species, due to this characteristic, creates a symbolic class of life, an artificial world. Time-binding reveals itself in an ``enormous increase in the control over nature.'' Time becomes real because it has consequences, and this efficacy has never been more painfully apparent.
Life, in its barest outline, is said to be a journey through time; that it is a journey through alienation is the most public of secrets. ``No clock strikes for the happy one,'' says a German proverb. Passing time, once meaningless, is now the inescapable beat, restricting and coercing us, mirroring blind authority itself. Guyau (1890) determined the flow of time to be ``the distinction between what one needs and what one has,'' and therefore ``the incipience of regret.'' Carpe diem, the maxim counsels, but civilization forces us always to mortgage the present to the future.
Time aims continually toward greater strictness of regularity and universality. Capital's technological world charts its progress by this, could not exist in its absence. ``The importance of time,'' wrote Bertrand Russell (1929), lies ``rather in relation to our desires than in relation to truth.'' There is a longing that is as palpable as time has become. The denial of desire can be gauged no more definitively than via the vast construct we call time.
Time, like technology, is never neutral; it is, as Castoriadis (1991) rightly judged, ``always endowed with meaning.'' Everything that commentators like Ellul have said about technology, in fact, applies to time, and more deeply. Both conditions are pervasive, omnipresent, basic, and in general as taken for granted as alienation itself. Time, like technology, is not only a determining fact but also the enveloping element in which divided society develops. Similarly, it demands that its subjects be painstaking, ``realistic'', serious, and above all, devoted to work. It is autonomous in its overall aspect, like technology; it goes on forever of its own accord.
But like division of labor, which stands behind and sets in motion time and technology, it is, after all, a socially learned phenomenon. Humans, and the rest of the world, are synchronized to time and its technical embodiment, rather than the reverse. Central to this dimension--as it is to alienation per se--is the feeling of being a helpless spectator. Every rebel, it follows, also rebels against time and its relentlessness. Redemption must involve, in a very fundamental sense, redemption from time.
Time and the Symbolic World
"Time is the accident of accidents,'' according to Epicurus. Upon closer examination, however, its genesis appears less mysterious. It has occurred to many, in fact, that notions such as "the past,'' "the present,'' and "the future'' are more linguistic than actual or physical. The neo-Freudian theorist Lacan, for example, decided that the time experience is essentially an effect of language. A person with no language would likely have no sense of the passage of time. R.A. Wilson (1980), moving much closer to the point, suggested that language was initiated by the need to express symbolic time. Gosseth (1972) argued that the system of tenses found in Indo-European languages developed along with consciousness of a universal or abstract time. Time and language are coterminous, decided Derrida (1982): ``to be in the one is to be in the other.'' Time is a symbolic construct immediately prior, relatively speaking, to all the others and which requires language for its actualization.
Paul Valry (1962) referred to the fall of the species into time as signalling alienation from nature; ``by a sort of abuse, man creates time,'' he wrote. In the timeless epoch before this fall, which constituted the overwhelming majority of our existence as humans, life, as has often been said, had a rhythm but not a progression. It was the state when the soul could ``gather in the whole of its being,'' in Rousseau's words, in the absence of temporal strictures, ``where time is nothing to the soul.'' Activities themselves, usually of a leisurely character, were the points of reference before time and civilization; nature provided the necessary signals, quite independent of ``time''. Humanity must have been conscious of memories and purposes long before any explicit distinctions were drawn among past, present, and future (Fraser, 1988). Furthermore, as the linguist Whorf (1956) estimated, ``preliterate [`primitive'] communities, far from being subrational, may show the human mind functioning on a higher and more complex plane of rationality than among civilized men.''
The largely hidden key to the symbolic world is time; indeed it is at the origin of human symbolic activity. Time thus occasions the first alienation, the route away from aboriginal richness and wholeness. ``Out of the simultaneity of experience, the event of Language,'' says Charles Simic (1971), ``is an emergence into linear time.'' Researchers such as Zohar (1982) consider faculties of telepathy and precognition to have been sacrificed for the sake of evolution into symbolic life. If this sounds far-fetched, the sober positivist Freud (1932) viewed telepathy as quite possibly ``the original archaic means through which individuals understand one another.'' If the perception and apperception of time relate to the very essence of cultural life (Gurevich 1976), the advent of this time sense and its concomitant culture represent an impoverishment, even a disfigurement, by time.
The consequences of this intrusion of time, via language, indicate that the latter is no more innocent, neutral, or assumption-free than the former. Time is not only, as Kant said, at the foundation of all our representations, but, by this fact, also at the foundation of our adaptation to a qualitatively reduced, symbolic world. Our experience in this world is under an all-pervasive pressure to be representation, to be almost unconsciously degraded into symbols and measurements. ``Time'', wrote the German mystic Meister Eckhart, ``is what keeps the light from reaching us.''
Time awareness is what empowers us to deal with our environment symbolically; there is no time apart from this estrangement. It is by means of progressive symbolization that time becomes naturalized, becomes a given, is removed from the sphere of conscious cultural production. ``Time becomes human in the measure to which it becomes actualized in narrative,'' is another way of putting it (Ricoeur 1984). The symbolic accretions in this process constitute a steady throttling of instinctive desire; repression develops the sense of time unfolding. Immediacy gives way, replaced by the mediations that make history possible--language in the forefront.
One begins to see past such banalities as ``time is an incomprehensible quality of the given world'' (Sebba 1991). Number, art, religion make their appearances in this ``given'' world, disembodied phenomena of reified life. These emerging rites, in turn, Gurevitch (1964) surmises, lead to ``the production of new symbolic contents, thus encouraging time leaping forward.'' Symbols, including time, of course, now have lives of their own, in this cumulative, interacting progression. David Braine's The Reality of Time and the Existence of God (1988) is illustrative. It argues that it is precisely time's reality which proves the existence of God; civilization's perfect logic.
All ritual is an attempt, through symbolism, to return to the timeless state. Ritual is a gesture of abstraction from that state, however, a false step that only leads further away. The ``timelessness'' of number is part of this trajectory, and contrib- utes much to time as a fixed concept. In fact, Blumenberg (1983) seems largely correct in assaying that ``time is not measured as something that has been present all along; instead it is produced, for the first time, by measurement.'' To express time we must, in some way, quantify it; number is therefore essential. Even where time has already appeared, a slowly more divided social existence works toward its progressive reification only by means of number. The sense of passing time is not keen among tribal peoples, for example, who do not mark it with calendars or clocks.
Time: an original meaning of the word in ancient Greek is division. Number, when added to time, makes the dividing or separating that much more potent. The non-civilized often have considered it ``unlucky'' to count living creatures, and generally resist adopting the practice (e.g. Dobrizhoffer 1822). The intuition for number was far from spontaneous and inevitable, but ``already in early civilizations,'' Schimmel (1992) reports, ``one feels that numbers are a reality having as it were a magnetic power field around them.'' It is not surprising that among ancient cultures with the strongest emerging senses of time--Egyptian, Babylonian, Mayan--we see numbers associated with ritual figures and deities; indeed the Mayans and Babylonians both had number gods (Barrow 1992).
Much later the clock, with its face of numbers, encouraged society to abstract and quantify the experience of time still further. Every clock reading is a measurement that joins the clock watcher to the ``flow of time.'' And we absently delude ourselves that we know what time is because we know what time it is. If we did away with clocks, Shallis (1982) reminds us, objective time would also disappear. More fundamentally, if we did away with specialization and technology, alienation would be banished.
The mathematizing of nature was the basis for the birth of modern rationalism and science in the West. This had stemmed from demands for number and measurement in connection with similar teachings about time, in the service of mercantile capitalism. The continuity of number and time as a geometrical locus were fundamental to the Scientific Revolution, which projected Galileo's dictum to measure all that is measurable and make measurable that which is not. Mathematically divisible time is necessary for the conquest of nature, and for even the rudiments of modern technology.
From this point on, number-based symbolic time became crushingly real, an abstract construction ``removed from and even contrary to every internal and external human experience'' (Syzamosi 1986). Under its pressure, money and language, merchandise and information have become steadily less distinguishable, and division of labor more extreme.
To symbolize is to express time consciousness, for the symbol embodies the structure of time (Darby 1982). Clearer still is Meerloo's formulation: ``To understand a symbol and its development is to grasp human history in a nutshell.'' The contrast is the life of the non-civilized, lived in a capacious present that cannot be reduced to the single moment of the mathematical present. As the continual now gave way to increasing reliance upon systems of significant symbols (language, number, art, ritual, myth) dislodged from the now, the further abstraction, history, began to develop. Historical time is no more inherent in reality, no less an imposition on it, than the earlier, less choate forms of time.
In a slowly more synthetic context, astronomical observation is invested with new meanings. Once pursued for its own sake, it comes to provide the vehicle for scheduling rituals and coordinating the activities of complex society. With the help of the stars, the year and its divisions exist as instruments of organizational authority (Leach 1954). The formation of a calendar is basic to the formation of a civilization. The calendar was the first symbolic artifact that regulated social behavior by keeping track of time. And what is involved is not the control of time but its opposite: enclosure by time in a world of very real alienation. One recalls that our word comes from the Latin calends, the first day of the month, when business accounts had to be settled.
Time to Pray, Time to Work
``No time is entirely present,'' said the Stoic Chrysippus, and meanwhile the concept of time was being further advanced by the underlying Judeo-Christian tenet of a linear, irreversible path between creation and salvation. This essentially historical view of time is the very core of Christianity; all the basic notions of measurable, one-way time can be found in St. Augustine's (fifth- century) writings. With the spread of the new religion the strict regulation of time, on a practical plane, was needed to help maintain the discipline of monastic life. Bells summoning the monks to prayer eight times daily were heard far beyond the confines of the cloister, and thus a measure of time regulation was imposed on society at large. The population continued to exhibit ``une vaste indiffrance au temps'' throughout the feudal era, according to Marc Bloch (1940), but it is no accident that the first public clocks adorned cathedrals in the West. Worth noting in this regard is the fact that the calling of precise prayer times became the chief externalization of medieval Islamic belief.
The invention of the mechanical clock was one of the most important turning points in the history of science and technology; indeed of all human art and culture (Synge 1959). The improvement in accuracy presented authority with enhanced opportunities for oppression. An early devotee of elaborate mechanical clocks, for example, was Duke Gian Galeazzo Visconti, described in 1381 as ``a sedate but crafty ruler with a great love of order and precision'' (Fraser 1988). As Weizenbaum (1976) wrote, the clock began to create ``literally a new reality...that was and remains an impoverished version of the old one.''
A qualitative change was introduced. Even when nothing was happening, time did not cease to flow. Events, from this era on, are put into this homogeneous, objectively measured, moving envelope--and this unilinear progression incited resistance. The most extreme were the chiliast, or millenarian, movements, which appeared in various parts of Europe from the 14th into the 17th centuries. These generally took the form of peasant risings which aimed at recreating the primal egalitarian state of nature and were explicitly opposed to historical time. These utopian explosions were quelled, but remnants of earlier time concepts persisted as a ``lower'' stratum of folk consciousness in many areas.
During the Renaissance, domination by time reached a new level as public clocks now tolled all twenty-four hours of the day and added new hands to mark the passing seconds. A keen sense of time's all- consuming presence is the great discovery of the age, and nothing portrays this more graphically than the figure of Father Time. Renaissance art fused the Greek god Kronos with the Roman god Saturn to form the familiar grim deity representing the power of Time, armed with a fatal scythe signifying his association with agriculture/domestication. The Dance of Death and other medieval memento mori artifacts preceded Father Time, but the subject is now time rather than death.
The seventeenth century was the first in which people thought of themselves as inhabiting a particular century. One now needed to take one's bearings within time. Francis Bacon's The Masculine Birth of Time (1603) and A Discourse Concerning a New Planet (1605) embraced the deepening dimension and revealed how a heightened sense of time could serve the new scientific spirit. "To choose time is to save time,'' he wrote, and "Truth is the daughter of time.'' Descartes followed, introducing the idea of time as limitless. He was one of the first advocates of the modern idea of progress, closely related to that of unbounded linear time, and characteristically expressing itself in his famous invitation that we become "masters and possessors of nature.''
Newton's clockwork universe was the crowning achievement of the Scientific Revolution in the seventeenth century, and was grounded in his conception of "Absolute, true and mathematical time, of itself and from its own nature, flowing equably without relation to anything eternal.'' Time is now the grand ruler, answering to no one, influenced by nothing, completely independent of the environment: the model of unassailable authority and perfect guarantor of unchanging alienation. Classical Newtonian physics in fact remains, despite changes in science, the dominant, everyday conception of time.
The appearance of independent, abstract time found its parallel in the emergence of a growing, formally free working class forced to sell its labor power as an abstract commodity on the market. Prior to the coming of the factory system but already subject to time's disciplinary power, this labor force was the inverse of the monarch Time: free and independent in name only. In Foucault's judgment (1973), the West had become a ``carceral society'' from this point on. Perhaps more directly to the point is the Balkan proverb, ``A clock is a lock.''
In 1749 Rousseau threw away his watch, a symbolic rejection of modern science and civilization. Somewhat more in the dominant spirit of the age, however, were the gifts of fifty-one watches to Marie Antoinette upon her engagement. The word is certainly appropriate, as people had to "watch'' the time more and more; watches would soon become one of the first consumer durables of the industrial era.
William Blake and Goethe both attacked Newton, the symbol of the new time and science, for his distancing of life from the sensual, his reduction of the natural to the measurable. Capitalist ideologue Adam Smith, on the other hand, echoed and extended Newton, by calling for greater rationalization and routinization. Smith, like Newton, labored under the spell of an increasingly powerful and remorseless time in promoting further division of labor as objective and absolute progress.
The Puritans had proclaimed waste of time the first and in principle the deadliest of sins (Weber 1921); this became, about a century later, Ben Franklin's "Time is money.'' The factory system was initiated by clockmakers and the clock was the symbol and fountainhead of the order, discipline and repression required to create an industrial proletariat.
Hegel's grand system in the early 19th century heralded the "push into time'' that is History's momentum; time is our "destiny and necessity,'' he declared. Postone (1993) noted that the "progress'' of abstract time is closely tied to the ``progress'' of capitalism as a way of life. Waves of industrialism drowned the resistance of the Luddites; appraising this general period, Lyotard (1988) decided that "the illness of time was now incurable.''
An increasingly complex class society requires an ever larger array of time signals. Fights against time, as Thompson (1967) and Hohn (1984) have pointed out, gave way to struggles over time; resistance to being yoked to time and its inherent demands was defeated in general, replaced, typically, by disputes over the fair determination of time schedules or the length of the work day. (In an address to the First International (July 28, 1868), Karl Marx advocated, by the way, age nine as the time to begin work.)
The clock descended from the cathedral, to court and courthouse, next to the bank and railway station, and finally to the wrist and pocket of each decent citizen. Time had to become more ``democratic'' in order to truly colonize subjectivity. The subjection of outer nature, as Adorno and others have understood, is successful only in the measure of the conquest of inner nature. The unleashing of the forces of production, to put it another way, depended on time's victory in its long-waged war on freer consciousness. Industrialism brought with it a more complete commodification of time, time in its most predatory form yet. It was this that Giddens (1981) saw as "the key to the deepest transformations of day-to-day social life that are brought about by the emergence of capitalism.''
"Time marches on,'' as the saying goes, in a world increasingly dependent on time and a time increasingly unified. A single giant clock hangs over the world and dominates. It pervades all; in its court there is no appeal. The standardization of world time marks a victory for the efficient/machine society, a universalism that undoes particularity as surely as computers lead to homogenization of thought.
Paul Virilio (1986) has gone so far as to foresee that ``the loss of material space leads to the government of nothing but time.'' A further provocative notion posits a reversal of the birth of history out of maturing time. Virilio (1991), in fact, finds us already living within a system of technological temporality where history has been eclipsed. "...the primary question becomes less one of relations to history than one of relations to time.''
Such theoretical flights aside, however, there is ample evidence and testimony as to time's central role in society. In "Time-- The Next Source of Competitive Advantage'' (July-August, 1988 Harvard Business Review), George Stark, Jr. discusses it as pivotal in the positioning of capital: "As a strategic weapon, time is the equivalent of money, productivity, quality, even innovation.'' Time management is certainly not confined to the corporations; Levine's 1985 study of publicly accessible clocks in six countries demonstrated that their accuracy was an exact gauge of the relative industrialization of national life. Paul Adler's January-February, 1993 Harvard Business Review offering, "Time-and-Motion Regained,'' nakedly champions the neo-Taylorist standardization and regimentation of work: behind the well-publicized "workplace democracy'' window dressing in some factories remains the "time- and-motion discipline and formal bureaucratic structures essential for efficiency and quality in routine operations.''